Now It’s Chic to Dine Sans a Din : Lush, Exotic Woods Hush the Hot Spots

A restaurant groupie recently asked architect Jeff Daniels, a restaurant designer: “So, is bird’s-eye maple the hippest wood to work with?”

“Deja passe,” replied Daniels, who, with Elyse Grinstein, is designing Chaya Venice.

“We’re actually using maple,” Daniels added, “but without the bird’s-eye.”

It’s subtle, but even foodies are taking notice. While the hipness of bird’s-eye maple is hotly contestable, the use of expensive, exotic woods in new restaurant designs is catching on like grilled radicchio.

Where granite, terrazzo and marble once reigned--on counters, bars, walls, floors and tables--suddenly wood is springing forth. Uncommon woods. Imported woods. Weird woods, some with unpronounceable names.

In Beverly Hills, it’s padauk at Kate Mantellini (sounds like pah-DUKE, hails from Africa) and paldao at Bice, opening late fall (correctly pronounced pal-DOW, originates in the Philippines). There is teak at Campanile (from Thailand; be sure to notice the carefully chosen “cathedral” grain). Bird’s-eye maple will be the decor at the Maple Drive restaurant in Beverly Hills, opening next month. And designer Barbara Lazaroff is considering maple, without the bird’s-eye, for Wolfgang Puck’s Eureka brewery, set to open at the end of the year in West Los Angeles. (While bird’s-eye is a spotted pattern created by irregular weather, both maples come from the Northwest United States and Canada.)

So what does it all mean?

Designers of several soon-to-open or recently opened restaurants agree that an era of restaurant softening is upon us. Owners and their clientele, they say, have maxed out on evenings spent in rooms encased in slick surfaces--and the deafening noise levels that such finishes create.

From a practical viewpoint, wood, even touches of it, absorbs sound. From a psychological viewpoint, restaurateurs are discovering it absorbs stress.

“If you want to go to a dentist’s office, you go to a dentist’s office,” says Mark Peel, co-owner with his wife, Nancy Silverton, of Campanile, which opened in June.

“Over the past five years, if not longer, there’s been a kind of sleek attack--painted dry wall, granite, marble, all smooth, hard surfaces,” says architect Josh Schweitzer. He cites his own previous work at City restaurant and Border Grill as prime examples.

Peel and Silverton worried that their 1927 redesign for Campanile was “in danger of being cold,” says Peel of the masonry block, Mediterranean-style structure on La Brea Avenue once used as an office by Charlie Chaplin. They hired Schweitzer, who agreed. He turned to accents of expensive, golden teak, installed on the bar front, hostess station and banquets. He would have used more, he says, but, alas, the budget wouldn’t permit. And there’s only one slab of granite: on the pastry table in the kitchen.

Last Word in Urban Chic

Not too long ago, poured concrete may have been the last word in urban chic, and all that noise was energizing. But people can’t take the din for too long. “The advantage of a noisy restaurant is you can move people in and out faster,” says restaurant consultant Richard Drapkin, formerly co-owner of Les Anges. “But at a certain point, you get sensory overload. You think, it was a good meal, but my chair’s too small and I’m going home. As people internalize more stress in their daily lives, they’re looking to a restaurant environment to ease the pressure of the day.”

In a sense, what’s happening is a redefinition of luxury. “Twenty years ago, Perino’s felt really good,” says Drapkin. But in contemporary Los Angeles, richness no longer means flocked wallpaper and leather banquettes. Instead, quality building materials like a beautiful, rare wood can feel elegant. “Today, rich isn’t necessarily plush,” says Drapkin.

(Price-wise, teak leads at $5.50 per board foot at Bohnhoff Lumber in Los Angeles, a major supplier to restaurants, while paldao is $4.50; padauk, $4; bird’s-eye maple, $3; and regular maple, $1.50.)

Architects acknowledge they want to tap into people’s emotions, and wood evokes warmth and sensuality. “It has a human kind of feeling,” says Grinstein. “In Japan, you see great thick slabs of wood on sushi bars. They’re so old they become wavy from being scrubbed down.”

Lined in Oak

“I told the architect, ‘Do anything you want, but remember, use wood,’ ” says Roberto Ruggeri, owner of Bice. Ruggeri knows from experience. The original Bice, built in Milan in 1926 and still going strong, is lined in oak. “It feels like home,” he says.

Michael Rotondi, a principal in the architectural firm Morphosis, responsible for Angeli, Kate Mantellini and 72 Market Street, agrees that architects are turning to materials that “are more emotionally charged.”

“If you see rusted steel, unless you fell in love on a battleship, you think of it as being cold,” he says.

Indeed, Rotondi suspects that Kate Mantellini owner Marilyn Lewis fell for padauk--the exotic redwood--because it appealed to her at a gut level. “She said, ‘Oh my god, I love that wood.’ I know she likes red because she has red hair and two beautiful red dogs.”

Morphosis is designing a restaurant in Chiba, Japan, incorporating plenty of hinoki, a pale wood from Japan that is “a little more yellow than maple.”

Like other architects working with wood, Rotondi insists it be used “naked”--unstained, and merely oiled to bring out its natural grain.

Likewise, Tony Greenberg, architect of Maple Drive, is incorporating a clear lacquer finish for the restaurant’s bird’s-eye maple. (The use of maple, he says, seemed a natural because of the restaurant’s location in the Maple Plaza building on Maple Drive.)

As Rotondi puts it, “The character of the material is what you want people to see. What’s better to press? Flesh or flesh with a sweater over it?”